Army To Create Mobile, High Tech Unit

Strike Force Could Go Anywhere In 96 Hours

February 22, 1999|By WILLIAM H. MCMICHAEL Daily Press

The wide variety of missions the Army envisions for Strike Force, however, raises the question of how one headquarters can competently command such a diverse group of units and capabilities. Mehaffey countered that top leaders already possess such capabilities. "We expect them to be broadly competent," he said.

One question the Strike Force experiment will try to answer, Mehaffey said, is, "can you apply that multi-disciplinary expertise at lower levels, and earlier in an officer's career?"

To that end, TRADOC will study ways to train individuals as well as organizations to gain "proficiency at more complex tasks," Mehaffey said.

Strike Force, he said, "will force an exploration of how you do that, in terms of your training systems, your leader development systems."

But the Army also will rely on high technology - the "smart machines" - to fill any knowledge gaps.

"You have a corps commander, and he has a general idea of how to employ various components - infantry, psychological operation, air defense, engineers," Mehaffey explained. "If he has a specific question - say, how fast the unit can travel, what sort of support it needs - he dials up somewhere in this huge headquarters, the expert in that area, and asks the question."

If that fails, he said, "I can hit a button and dial up the expert" back in the United States.

Admits Mehaffey, "It's a big reliance on technology. But you rely on it as well. We all do. I mean, there's enough confidence today that we can do that. The question is, what are the basic skills that you need to retain for when the technology fails, and what can you build in redundancy in the systems to be able to provide for it? And that's part of what we're looking at."

A sudden breakdown of all those computers would "degrade" the unit but not shut it down, he said.

"It happens to us today, in 'analog' units," he said. "All the time. Radios break. And so now you can't get the message, you gotta send a messenger. Or you gotta get the radio repaired.

"We train in degraded modes," he said. "We have drills for operating when our radio systems are jammed, and we rehearse those, practice those. We do the same thing with computers."

William H. McMichael can be reached at 247-7862 or by e-mail at bmcmichael@dailypress.com